Overview

Blekinge County Council is one of the leading healthcare providers in Sweden. It currently serves more than 150,000 residents of Blekinge County in southern Sweden. The Council is responsible for managing patient information at two hospital locations—in Karlskrona and Karlshamn—that receive more than 500,000 patient visits each year. All patient information must be managed in ccordance with the Swedish Data Protection Act.

Blekinge County Council employs more than 5,000 staff members with 4,200 workstations. It operates a data center with multiple locations for redundancy, and three server rooms with approximately 560 servers. “We currently have approximately 70% of our servers virtualized, and plan to have 80% virtualized within the next two years,” said Per Johansson, Director of Administration at Blekinge County Council.

Challenges

Blekinge County Council faced several IT challenges related to security and system availability. Because the council’s IT team manages the security of all patient information, it must adhere to the Swedish Data Protection Act regulations. However, a complex IT environment presented obstacles to ensuring the safety of personal healthcare data—especially in today’s evolving threat landscape. “We used solutions from four different security vendors, which added complexity. We needed an easy-to-administer technology solution from a single vendor that provided an overview of our security and the ability to detect and stop different types of attacks,” said Johansson.

In addition to ensuring a secure IT environment, Blekinge also needed to deliver IT services for uninterrupted healthcare operations. “Our IT environment has grown substantially in recent years,” said Johansson. “It is not only extensive, but also an incredibly integrated, complex mix of medical and patient administration systems.”

"Unlike other vendors with products new to the market, Trend Micro offered a mature solution with Deep Security that’s been validated in many healthcare IT environments."

Per Johansson,Director of Administration at Blekinge County Council

The complexity of their integrated IT environment posed certain limitations on how they could apply security adaptations. For example, some systems did not allow them to apply comprehensive security, creating problems with restricted access and slow-performance. “Access to patient information is a critical factor, but the accuracy of the information can determine whether patients survive or not,” said Johansson. “It was absolutely essential to deliver secure IT services without interruption or interference.”

Smart Protection Suite is a comprehensive suite that integrates security across multiple layers, including endpoints, applications, and networks, using the broadest range of anti-malware techniques available. The solution also offers flexible cloud deployment, simplified licensing, and central management for network-wide visibility and control of threats and data.

Deep Security delivers advanced, comprehensive security across physical, virtual, and cloud servers in one solution. It protects enterprise applications and data from breaches and business disruptions without requiring emergency patching.

With Trend Micro, Blekinge was able to consolidate four security vendors down to one, which saved valuable time and money. The comprehensive solutions also provided significant benefits. For example, Deep Security increased the organization’s security level with virtual patching on server applications, while Deep Discovery provided greater visibility. “With Deep Discovery, we can monitor network traffic to ensure better control, comply with regulations, and future-proof the IT environment,” said Johansson.

Trend Micro™ Control Manager™ simplifies administration by making it easy to manage users across multiple threat vectors from a single pane of glass. “Control Manager makes it easy to control security across the IT environment and enables our team to deliver greater security more efficiently,” said Johansson.

"When you manage 24x7 operations in which the majority of systems are vital to patient safety, the ability to protect both virtual and physical environments is critical."

Per Johansson,Director of Administration at Blekinge County Council

“When you manage 24x7 operations in which the majority of systems are vital to patient safety, the ability to protect virtual and physical environments is critical. All of the vulnerabilities found do not follow the service windows available to the company. Deep Security enables us to protect the environment until we can patch vulnerabilities and reboot the system,” said Johansson.

Results

With Trend Micro, Blekinge County Council has the technology tools it needs to ensure IT security meets the requirements of Sweden’s Privacy Protection Law (PUL) and Patient Data Act. They now have stable, easy-to-use, multi-level protection against malware and other targeted attacks, so they can keep their patient records safe, and their access to healthcare information uninterrupted.

After integrating Trend Micro solutions with their applications and systems, Blekinge now has a complete view of its IT environment, enabling its team to quickly detect, isolate, and resolve problems.

"The Trend Micro support staff provided personal assistance 24x7, including product specialists who were invaluable during the implementation and with any IT incidents."

Per Johansson,Director of Administration at Blekinge County Council

“We found Trend Micro Premium Gold Support was truly worth its weight in gold. The Trend Micro support staff provided personal assistance 24x7, including ear-marked product specialists who were invaluable, during both implementation and in the event of any IT incidents,” said Johansson.